”It’s interesting, because looking back, if they had done the fourth one and they had done this hugely successful game that blew us away, I might feel kind of bad about that,” Fiorito noted, adding ”It was pretty easy to leave it behind.”
Insomniac’s small team had grown tired of the IP. “I think, doing three games in three years, it was just non-stop,” he admitted. Working on Ratchet & Clank was a relief for the developer, as he stated, ”It felt really good to do something different. Still though, Insomniac didn’t always like what was done with the subsequent games.”
Fiorito then made the shocking admission that he thought Spyro was a dead IP.
“If you’d asked me (how I felt about Spyro) a year ago, I’d probably say something like, ‘Well, look what happened to this stupid franchise. It turned into garbage.’” Fiorito admitted. “But clearly someone did something really brilliant with it.”
That ”something really brilliant” was the use of physical figurines that behaved like downloadable content; placing the statuette on a special base introduced that character into the game.
“It’s such a cool idea,” he marveled, but then admitted, ”It wouldn’t have worked when we were making Spyro. It’s like the right place at the right time.”
Skylanders Giants is due to be released in mid-October for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
